1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a telephone instrument housing constructed from a first section and a second section, the first and second section being connected together to form a housing, the second section comprising a plurality of identical first sub-sections which are substantially rectangular in plan, the number of first sub-sections being dependent on the dimensions of the first section which is formed in one piece.
2. Description of the Related Art
Telephone instrument housing are commonly constructed from a base section and a top section (base and top referring to a table top rather than wall mounted instrument). Typically the base section has items such as a tone caller mounted within it and the top section carries push buttons and perhaps a visual display and supports the handset.
There is a trend towards adding further facilities to telephone instruments, such as visual displays, repertory diallers, loudspeaking or "hands free" operation, and data transmission. Thus a family of instruments which may have a selection of these facilities may be required. This brings the problem of how to allow for the different facilities to be provided in the most economic fashion. Clearly the different instruments will require different sized housings, dependent on the number and type of facilities provided. Since the housings of the instruments are normally plastic mouldings a variety of different mouldings are required. This greatly increases the tooling costs for a range of instruments, particularly since the various options offered tends to reduce the quantity of any individual instrument type required.
A telephone instrument housing such as set forth in the opening paragraph is disclosed in applicant's copending applications Ser. Nos. 916,918 and 916,919 filed concurrently herewith, which application Ser. No. 916,918 issued on Sept. 20, 1988 as U.S. Pat. 4,773,090, and which application Ser. No. 916,919 is now abandoned; and is also disclosed in German Patent No. 1223889. The telephone instrument housing of such patent is described therein as formed by a base section into which a plurlaity of modules can be plugged, the modules containing various functional arrangements which can be connected together to form a complete instrument e.g. handset module, dial module, and a module containing a recall button. In the arrangements shown in FIGS. 1 to 3 of the German Patent all the modules are different from one another. However the arrangement shown in FIG. 4 contains two types of module which are duplicated. The telephone instrument disclosed in the German Patent goes some way towards solving the problems set out hereinbefore but still lacks flexibility since changes within a module cannot easily be carried out without affecting the overall appearance.